from high in a tree, hidden in a maze of boughs.
“What are you doing up there? Is there a bear nearby?”
“Nope, just finding comfort in a tree,” she said and began her way down.
Together the three skiffed toward Juneau, the jagged sentinel mountains guarding the icefield growing closer, the sharp wind on their faces.
Forty years later, my dad still brags about my mom’s tree-climbing abilities. She still claims that she wasn’t afraid of bears but was simply trying to get a better view.
Hunting stories are the oldest stories we have. My brothers and I listened to our dad’s as we grew. We poked and examined the game he brought home to feed us. When we became old enough, he’d take us along, decreasing his odds of harvesting a deer but showing us the woods and how to hunt. When we were teenagers, we began to bring deer and our own stories home from the rainforest.
The first buck my dad shot was one of the biggest deer anyone in our family has harvested, not that it matters. What does matter is that more than forty years ago, amidst a rainforest of brown bears, my dad encountered something timeless and difficult to articulate in the presence of an eagle, a raven, and a deer. It is a gift he received and passed on to his sons.
SOOTY OBSESSION
I GREW UP IN JUNEAU, a city of thirty thousand surrounded by a wild expanse of temperate rainforest, mountains, and glaciers. Each summer, millions of salmon migrate up the rivers and streams of northern Southeast Alaska to spawn. Their flesh sustains some of the densest concentrations of bald eagles and brown bears in the world. Autumn brings more rain, blusters, and a loss of daylight that contribute to a widespread melancholy and even depression in locals. The darkness and storms of winter inspire many animals, people included, to migrate south or hibernate. Solace comes in the spring, when days grow longer and ridges and mountainsides come alive with the hooting of sooty grouse.
When I was a kid, I constantly dreamt of hooters. What did they look like? What did they taste like? Would I ever successfully hunt one? Each spring I listened to the sounds of their courtship booming off the steep, forested ridges and slopes and felt magnetically drawn. Hooters, the colloquial term for male sooty grouse, haunted much of my adolescence, so much so that I’d often wake at night in a cold sweat, my bedroom echoing with the sound of their mating calls.
When I was thirteen, my dad cut me loose with a bow, and I set off to become a hunter. With my pal Thad, I thrashed through alders and devil’s club—a very thorny and prolific member of the ginseng family—and hung off mountainsides trying to pinpoint the source of hooting. It seemed impossible to find a grouse high up in the thick tangle of branches, so we convinced ourselves it was just as likely they lived in dens on the ground. We investigated quite a few holes, one of which had been recently vacated by a bear. We never did spot a grouse; nonetheless, Thad tried to convince me we had accomplished something great.
“We’re men now,” he said toward the end of grouse season as we sat on the side of Eaglecrest Road waiting for my dad to pick us up.
“I wonder what a hooter looks like?” I said.
That summer, fall, and winter, I was haunted by hooters. I set about training one of our family’s dogs, Buff, a young male Labrador retriever, to retrieve birds. Buff and I, armed with my bow, stalked several chickens I was raising—something my brothers still love to tease me about. While they frequently dispute who has shot bigger deer, they’re always quick to give me credit for killing the biggest chicken.
Before long, Buff was retrieving chickens pretty well, and Dad helped me pick out a .22 rifle. While I was preparing for another season of thrashing through the woods and climbing into bear dens hoping to find a bird, I lucked out and befriended Tim, a seasoned grouse hunter old enough to have his driver’s license. I told him about my inability to find any grouse the previous season despite investigating hundreds of likely looking holes in the earth, and he shook his head in disgust.
“They’re up high in trees!” he said and, in a moment of compassion that would change my life forever, offered to take me along on a hunt. The following weekend, Tim, Buff, and I climbed a steep hill above a giant fjord. We plowed through brush and devil’s club, clung to roots poking out from cliffs, and sunk into the decaying forest’s floor. We clambered around a mossy cliff and came down on the sound of a booming grouse. For the next long while, I stared up at the dark canopy of branches while Tim scanned every nook and cranny in the maze of conifers.
“There he is!” he hollered. I rushed over but saw only branches and brush as Tim sighed impatiently. Finally, as the grouse boomed its mating call, I saw a dark chicken-sized bird bobbing its head in a web of branches. Tim offered me the shot, but I declined on the principle that I wouldn’t pull the trigger until I spotted a bird myself. He shook his head and muttered something about the unlikeliness of that happening anytime soon. At the crack of the shot, the bird plummeted, and Buff plunged down the steep slope and disappeared into the brush. A short while later, he huffed his way back to us with the grouse held softly in his mouth. I examined its bluish-gray feathers and appreciated the patterns of its plumage as Buff rested a paw on me. Tim gave us a curious look, no doubt impressed with my dog even if he thought I was a fool. The three of us went hunting a lot that spring. I didn’t spot a single hooter, but Buff retrieved every grouse we knocked out of a tree.
The woods became my refuge and Buff my constant companion and best friend. While other kids my age were dating, partying, and suffering from teen anxieties, I spent all my extra time hunting and exploring, mostly alone with my dog. We encountered wolves—one scrawny and hungry-looking loner tried its best to lure Buff away from my side. We surprised bears, some of whom huffed and clacked their teeth as we slowly backed away. On one occasion with Tim, we “accidentally” shot a big buck high on a mountain during a hike after school. We’d been walking along an alpine ridge late in the day when we unexpectedly encountered three deer in a ravine below. It just happened to be open season. Tim was one of those guys who believed in hiking with a rifle for fitness; he rarely entered the woods without packing. Together, we made a short stalk—not an easy task with a big Lab—and lined up on a big buck.
“This is a really bad idea,” Tim said. We had no packs or knives, and getting down to the animal looked nothing short of heinous. I persuaded Tim it would be irrational not to shoot. We missed school the next day and showed up at home covered in deer blood, exhausted but happy.
Buff was a lovable fool and baby at home, but he became proud, focused, and riveted to my side whenever we went in the woods. We learned to hunt waterfowl together. When I’d make a lousy shot, Buff would dive underwater to catch wounded ducks or swim hundreds of yards, despite my yelling, into choppy seas after a crippled bird. He’d return with a grouse even if it glided far down a mountain and work clumps of brush to jump birds in the early fall.
Buff, my best pal growing up, on a lake in northern British Columbia.
My obsession with sooty grouse hunting got so bad during my last two years of high school that I could think of little else once late winter came around. While my fellow students were at senior prom, Buff and I explored new territory loaded with hooters north of town. We bivouacked beneath a giant spruce, our shivering bodies pressed together, trying to fend off the cold, rain, and thoughts of brown bears during the long night.
After high school, I ventured beyond Juneau, and my shotgun and .22 collected dust in my parents’ closet. While I tried to navigate college, work, and travel, I felt remorseful for leaving Buff behind. While I tried to figure out what to do with my life, I forgot how much our hunts and explorations meant to me. When I visited home, I could tell the strength of our bond had weakened. Buff became horribly arthritic, and I blamed myself for working him too hard. I cringed when he yelped while climbing the stairs.
For our last hunt, my little brother, Reid, and I took him grouse hunting. He gimped up the